Edinburgh ethicist Isabel Dalhousie’s 13th outing offers her an uncomfortable new role and another that’s already uncomfortably familiar.
Impressed by Isabel’s decisive reaction to the semipublic shaming of an asset-stripping capitalist, retired physician Iain Melrose approaches her with an unusual request. He doesn’t know her, he acknowledges, but they have mutual friends, and he’d appreciate it if she’d agree to serve as executor of his estate. It’s a big ask, because Melrose has been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and he’s particularly concerned that a substantial plot of open land he owns outside Argyll be preserved by whichever of his cousins inherits it: Jack the artist, Sarah the builder, or John the accountant. Shortly after reluctantly accepting this commission, Isabel realizes that the unfortunate history she has with Jack’s wife, Hilary, who served with Isabel as a juror in a lawsuit, complicates her task in unwelcome ways. Closer to home, she must deal with her niece Cat’s plans to marry the unsuitably leonine Leo, apply to the trust that supports both her and Isabel for the funding to buy a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, and sell the delicatessen that offers Eddie, her fragile assistant, his only serious hope of employment. “Where were the boundaries of your moral responsibility for others?” Isabel wonders, and wonders, and wonders some more.
The elegant resolution of both problems makes this the ethicist's best in more than a decade.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4894-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lindsay Boxer faces a ton of trouble in the latest entry in Patterson and Paetro’s Women’s Murder Club series.
Senior crime reporter Cindy Thomas is writing a biography of Evan Burke, a notorious serial killer who sits in solitary confinement in San Quentin. She’s kidnapped by thugs wanting her to talk about her best friend, Lindsay Boxer, who’s an SFPD homicide detective and the story’s main character. San Francisco has a restrictive new gun law, and gun-totin’ folks everywhere have their boxer shorts in a twist. A national resistance movement has formed—Defenders of the Second—whose motto is “We will not comply.” They find it outrageous that the new law makes it illegal to own a gun that can kill 50 people with a single clip. Meanwhile, lots of bodies show up: A young girl disappears and is later found dead in a ditch, and ex-cops are found dead with their lips stapled shut and “You talk, you die” written on their foreheads. An inmate is found hanged in prison. And “a massive but unspecified load of military-style weaponry was en route from Mexico to the City by the Bay.” In a “frustrating, multipronged case,” there’s a harrowing shootout memorialized in a video showing “twenty-two of the scariest seconds” of Boxer’s life. She’s an appealing series hero with loving family and friends, but she may arrive at a crossroads where she has “to choose between my work and [my] baby girl.” The formulaic story has unmemorable writing, but it’s entertaining and well told. You probably won’t have to worry about the main characters, who have thus far survived 21 adventures. Except for the little girl, you can expect people to get what they deserve. It's relatively mild as crime novels go, but the women characters are serious, strong, and admirable.
Enjoyable storytelling by two masters of the craft.Pub Date: May 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-49937-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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A domestic-terrorist plot gives the adopted daughter of storied U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport her moment to shine.
Veteran oilman Vermilion Wright knows that losing a few thousand gallons of crude is no more than an accounting error to his company but could mean serious money to whomever’s found a way to siphon it off from wells in Texas’ Permian Basin. So he asks Sen. Christopher Colles, Chair of Homeland Security and Government Affairs, to look into it, and Colles persuades 24-year-old Letty Davenport, who’s just quit his employ, to return and partner with Department of Homeland Security agent John Kaiser to track down the thieves. The plot that right-winger Jane Jael Hawkes and her confederates, most of them service veterans with disgruntled attitudes and excellent military skills, have hatched is more dire than anything Wright could have imagined. They plan to use the proceeds from the oil thefts to purchase some black-market C4 essential to a major act of terrorism that will simultaneously express their alarm about the country’s hospitality to illegal immigrants and put the Jael-Birds on the map for good. But they haven’t reckoned with Letty, another kid born on the wrong side of the tracks who can outshoot the men she’s paired with and outthink the vigilantes she finds herself facing—and who, along with her adoptive father, makes a memorable pair of “pragmatists. Really harsh pragmatists” willing to do whatever needs doing without batting an eye or losing a night’s sleep afterward.
Generations may succeed generations, but Sandford’s patented investigation/action formula hasn’t aged a whit. Bring it on.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32868-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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